How Dispatch Management Software Helps Businesses Manage Peak Shipping Seasons like Ramadan

Updated: Mar 9, 2023

Ramadan is approaching! Tenah Abang, the largest textile market in Southeast Asia, will soon be teeming with tailors and other vendors eager to provide their wares. As families prepare for the upcoming holiday, extravagant feasts will be commonplace, resulting in a surge in demand for food items.

Ramadan and Raya mark the peak shipping times for delivery businesses across Southeast Asia, requiring the companies to demonstrate their operational capabilities to accommodate this surge in orders.

Customers want to get their orders on time during these festive seasons, so the shipments need to have a shorter turnaround time. This challenge is further compounded by road congestion and traffic that can impede the drivers’ ability to complete their assigned orders as planned. Handling the deliveries manually or using a simple spreadsheet becomes an insurmountable task in such conditions.

As a result, investing in technology to improve dispatch management becomes a necessity. This is where dispatch management software comes into play, providing the essential tools for streamlining operations and enhancing the overall efficiency.

How does a dispatch management software help businesses manage peak delivery periods like Ramadan

A survey of 2000 Indonesians has forecasted that 88% of the population plans to make purchases during the upcoming 2023 Ramadan season, with female millennial online shoppers expected to spend more than the general population.

During this Ramadan and Raya seasons, we will witness a quick surge in demand for home and living items, modest fashion, beauty products, and food items. A delivery business should perform at its best during these peak times to ensure the revenue targets for the year are attained.

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With customers paying close attention to brands’ ability to fulfill their delivery requirements during peak shipping seasons, delivering a positive customer experience is paramount. A Salesforce survey states that 89% of customers would likely make another purchase after a positive customer experience. Investing in dispatch management software is the key to providing a positive customer experience during these peak seasons.

Before investing in dispatch management software, knowing how it benefits businesses is necessary. Let’s take a closer look at these advantages.

Improves customer loyalty

In Indonesia, it’s relatively more challenging to fulfill orders due to difficult-to-navigate roads. Reduced working hours and roadway congestion can cause unexpected delays in regions like the Middle East.

These geographical challenges and the usual delivery complexities like driver skill sets, customer-preferred time slots, and traffic jams make routing challenging, and negatively impact the customer experience.

Delivery delays and lack of communication regarding parcel status can lead to frustration and customer churn, ultimately affecting the brand’s reputation. Visibility is critical for managing complex last-mile logistics and for ensuring a good customer experience.

Dispatch management software ensures customers stay informed with white-labeled tracking, proactive alerts on order progress, and personalized shipping pages. Its timely notifications on delays, exceptions, cancellations and refunds minimize the order status queries and “Where Is My Order” (WISMO) calls made daily. These proactive updates and on-time deliveries can help businesses provide a smooth customer experience and drive repeat purchases.

Makes drivers happy

A large inflow of orders to be fulfilled along with traffic congestion causes drivers to work for additional hours during peak seasons. It is important to remember that your customers’ satisfaction levels are directly proportional to your drivers’ happiness. The only way to ensure the drivers are happy is to fix a delivery schedule and optimize routes, so drivers have enough time to fulfill them on time.

A dispatch management software generates optimal route recommendations for drivers based on constraints like traffic, road closures, and driver breaks. These route recommendations, with detailed navigation and realistic Expected Times of Arrival (ETA), provide drivers enough time to transit between each delivery stop and complete their order fulfillment much ahead of their planned time.

Getting enough time to deliver orders between each stop minimizes the likelihood of haste driving. By letting the drivers complete the tasks much before the anticipated time, dispatch management software keeps them from spending long hours on the road.

Makes navigation easier

Many regions in Southeast Asia and some in the Middle East have geographical irregularities. Many places do not have proper formal postcodes either. It becomes difficult for drivers to navigate the destination without accurate details on precise delivery destinations. As a result of this, their upcoming deliveries get delayed.

Manually dealing with these issues makes fulfillment operations costly and inefficient, leading to dissatisfied consumers. An effective tool is the need of the hour to manage these crucial delivery hiccups.

With its geocoding, a dispatch management software converts improper addresses into precise geographical coordinates. This enables your drivers to reach the exact delivery destination on time and minimize the chances of failed or missed deliveries.

Minimizes time-to-dispatch

Brand A: Provides only a single time slot for an order

Brand B: Provides multiple time slot options to the customer

Customers prefer Brand B because it offers greater flexibility and allows them to choose their preferred delivery time. This trust leads to customer satisfaction and a faster dispatch time.

But can it minimize the time to dispatch? It’s a definite “Yes”.

With delivery-linked checkout, a dispatch management platform provides multiple time slots to customers. This feature integrates these custom time slots with dynamic capacity slotting. This makes it easier for fleet managers to fully utilize vehicle capacity and ensure on-time deliveries without compromising profitability.

By automating carrier assignment based on vehicle capacity, cost, delivery speed, and time window preferences, dispatching software saves time in dispatching the orders.

Helps manage multi-carrier shipments

Say that a fleet manager has some critical shipments to dispatch on the fasting day of Ramadan. But your business uses multiple contract fleets and wants the fleet manager to streamline it. If your company uses various systems to monitor fleet performance and contract reconciliation, it may be difficult for him to complete dispatches for the day. But a dispatch management software can simplify this task.

Dispatch management software provides a unified dashboard for fleet managers to track and manage shipments. It helps them quickly access real-time quotes for carriers and reconcile contracts for multiple carriers. Connecting to multiple high-performing carriers in a single dashboard minimizes the time and cost of integrating various systems. By simplifying dispatches of multi-carrier shipments and streamlining them effectively, dispatch management software helps fleet managers complete their tasks on time and spend quality time with their families.

Provides actionable insights

Where did my delivery fulfillment go wrong during the last Ramadan? Only data can answer this question for your business.

Data is critical to fuel repeat purchases and improve profitability. By providing key metrics like Service Level Agreements (SLA) adherence, On-Time In-Full (OTIF) and First Attempted Delivery Rates, and delivery costs, dispatch management software helps your businesses evaluate carrier performance. It also enables you to identify gaps, inefficiencies, and roadblocks to optimizing shipment operations and rectify them. These insights help your business improve the upcoming carrier assignments and delivery performance.

Conclusion

Due to Ramadan and Raya, many companies in Southeast Asia and Middle East regions will have shorter working hours to cater to lifestyle changes. These shorter working hours and heavy traffic are the biggest challenges to counter during these times. A delivery business should invest in a dispatch management platform to address the likelihood of decreased productivity and improve service levels during this peak shipping time.

Do you need clarification on which dispatch management solution to buy? We’ll break it down.

Locus’ dispatch management platform simplifies and streamlines your dispatching operations with multiple solutions. These include real-time fleet tracking, route optimization, delivery-linked checkout, parcel orchestration, insights, analytics, and geocoding. With these platform offerings, your businesses can make cost-efficient business decisions in managing the delivery performance of the contracted fleets and reconciling their contracts.

With its advanced route optimization, Locus’ dispatch management software provides the most optimal route recommendations and helps you use fleet capacity best. This enables you to rightsize the vehicles and connect with the available drivers quickly, making your last-mile deliveries more productive and sustainable during the peak shipping seasons. Finally, its real-time tracking and proactive alerts help your business provide a frictionless and delightful customer experience.

Are you looking to make your deliveries productive during this Ramadan and Raya? Schedule a demo with us!

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References:

https://www.thetradedesk.com/us/news/press-room/new-research-shows-9-in-10-indonesians-plan-to-make-a-purchase-during-the-upcoming-ramadan
https://c1.sfdcstatic.com/content/dam/web/en_us/www/documents/research/salesforce-state-of-the-connected-customer-4th-ed.pdf